Paranormal Glossary: From Banshee to Yūrei

Hearing meaningful sounds, especially words, in random noise. Experiments show that simply telling people a recording may contain ghost voices makes them more likely to hear voices in it.

From the Irish bean sí, "woman of the fairy mound": a supernatural woman whose keening cry foretells a death in certain Irish families. She announces death but does not cause it.

A colorless, odorless gas from incompletely burned fuel that causes headaches, dizziness, confusion and sometimes hallucinations, and can kill. Unexplained symptoms or a "presence" in a home with fuel-burning appliances are a reason to check for it and use a carbon monoxide alarm.

Spanish for goat-sucker: a creature blamed for livestock deaths in Puerto Rico from 1995. Benjamin Radford traced the founding description to the 1995 film Species, and later doglike chupacabras in the United States proved to be coyotes and dogs with severe mange.

A rare psychiatric delusion in which a person believes they have turned into an animal, often a wolf. It usually occurs alongside severe mental illness, and may account for some confessions in early modern werewolf trials.

An animal that has been reported but not confirmed by science, such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. The word was coined in 1983; the field that studies such reports is called cryptozoology.

Sounds on an audio recording that listeners interpret as voices nobody heard at the time. The idea spread after Friedrich Jürgenson's tapes of 1959; psychologists attribute most EVP to auditory pareidolia, stray radio and unnoticed ordinary sounds.

A handheld instrument that measures electromagnetic fields, usually the low-frequency fields around household wiring and appliances. Ghost hunters use them to look for spikes, but wiring, appliances and phones produce the same readings.

Traces of DNA that living things shed into water, soil or air, which can be sequenced to list the species present without seeing them. A 2018 eDNA survey of Loch Ness found no reptile DNA but a great deal of eel DNA.

A complex superior mirage that forms when cold air lies beneath warmer air, lifting, stretching and stacking images of distant objects such as ships. It is the most credible explanation for many phantom-ship reports.

The distant, unnamed person to whom an urban legend supposedly happened. The British writer Rodney Dale coined the abbreviation in the 1970s; the witness is always one step out of reach.

A vivid sight, sound or sensation experienced while falling asleep; the equivalent on waking is called hypnopompic. Such hallucinations are common and often accompany sleep paralysis.

Small, unconscious muscle movements driven by an idea or expectation rather than a conscious decision. Named by William Carpenter in 1852 and demonstrated by Michael Faraday in 1853, it explains table turning, dowsing pendulums and the movement of a Ouija board pointer.

Sound below about 20 hertz, too low for most people to hear, produced by wind, traffic, machinery and ventilation. Some studies suggest it can cause unease, and Vic Tandy traced one "haunted" laboratory to a 19 hertz standing wave from a fan.

A winged creature of New Jersey Pine Barrens folklore, said to be the cursed thirteenth child of a woman known as Mother Leeds in 1735. Newspapers reported hundreds of encounters during a single week in January 1909.

The Weeping Woman of Mexican and wider Latin American folklore, a spirit heard crying by rivers at night for the children she drowned. Her origins are debated, and the story remains a living tradition.

An informal name for a living species closely resembling relatives known from ancient fossils, such as the coelacanth, a fish thought extinct for 66 million years until one was caught off South Africa in 1938.

The tendency of witnesses who discuss an event to absorb details from one another, so that they later report things they did not see themselves. It makes accounts from witnesses who have talked less independent than they appear.

The finding, developed by Elizabeth Loftus and others, that misleading information received after an event can become part of a person's memory of the event itself.

A large winged figure with glowing red eyes reported around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, from November 1966. A wildlife biologist at the time suggested a sandhill crane; later retellings linked it to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse, which investigators traced to a failed steel eyebar.

A vengeful yūrei in Japanese tradition, a ghost that returns to punish those who wronged it. The best-known is Oiwa from the 1825 kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan.

A translucent circle in a photograph, usually caused by flash backscatter: light from a flash reflecting off dust, pollen, moisture or insects just in front of the lens, so close that each speck blurs into a disc.

The tendency to perceive a meaningful pattern, especially a face or a voice, in something random or vague, such as clouds, shadows or static. It is a normal feature of human perception.

About a minute of 16mm footage shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin at Bluff Creek, California, on October 20, 1967, showing a large, hair-covered figure walking away from the camera. Whether it shows an animal or a person in a suit has never been settled.

From the German for noisy ghost: a pattern of disturbances such as knocks, thrown objects and moving furniture that tends to center on one person in a household, often a child or teenager, and to last weeks or months. Skeptical investigators have traced many cases to trickery.

A term coined by the parapsychologists J. Gaither Pratt and William Roll after a 1958 case on Long Island, proposing that the young person at the center of a poltergeist case produces the effects unconsciously with the mind. It has never been accepted by mainstream science.

A name for Bigfoot that comes from sásq'ets in Halkomelem, a Coast Salish language of southwestern British Columbia. It was popularized in English from the late 1920s by J. W. Burns.

A gathering, traditionally around a table in a darkened room, at which a medium attempts to communicate with the dead. Séances became widespread with the rise of Spiritualism after 1848.

A brief state on waking or falling asleep in which a person is aware but cannot move, often with a sensed presence, figures or pressure on the chest. It is caused by REM sleep paralysis continuing into wakefulness and is generally harmless.

A radio receiver modified to sweep rapidly through AM or FM stations, producing a stream of static and broadcast fragments that users interpret as answers from spirits. Everything it plays is real radio.

Photographs claimed to show the spirits of the dead, popularized by William Mumler in the 1860s. Mumler was tried for fraud in 1869 and acquitted, but his images are now regarded as fakes made with techniques such as double exposure.

A religious movement founded on the belief that the dead survive and can communicate through mediums. It grew from the Fox sisters' rappings in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, and Spiritualist churches still exist today.

The famous 1934 picture of a long neck rising from Loch Ness, credited to the London doctor Robert Kenneth Wilson. In 1994 researchers published Christian Spurling's account that it showed a toy submarine fitted with a sculpted head and neck.

A story told as true about a recent, usually local event that supposedly happened to a friend of a friend, which spreads in many versions. Folklorists often prefer the term contemporary legend.

A faint light seen over marshes at night that retreats when approached, also called ignis fatuus, "foolish fire". Marsh gas is the leading explanation, but no one has convincingly reproduced the effect, so its cause is not settled.

The Japanese ghost: the spirit of someone who cannot rest, often after a violent death or neglected funeral rites. Since the Edo period it has usually been pictured as a woman in a white burial kimono with long loose hair and no feet.